Hardware stores and home-centers constitute a growing segment of the retail market. More homeowners are deciding to tackle a wide variety of home improvement and repair projects themselves so that they save money and add value to their homes. Competition between these retailers has increased in recent years with the customers usually patronizing the store that they find makes it easiest for them to obtain the materials needed to complete their work.
One of the reasons that a homeowner commonly travels to a hardware store is the need to purchase a certain tool or other item. Searching for this particular product at such outlets can, however, be often difficult and frustrating. The number of sales personnel available to provide help is always limited and the customer can easily become disoriented in the huge expanse of the modern home-center with its aisle after aisle of tools and building materials.
Most customers have little interest or time, however, to scour a store in order to find the various items on their list. Oftentimes, the search can even become an exercise in futility since the tool sought may be difficult to identify from the multitude of other hardware displayed on the shelves or in the bins.
A way of catching the eye of the customer to spare him or her from the needless waste of time spent hunting down the desired tool is therefore an aim of nearly all retailers. Any apparatus that prominently and openly displays a specific product has particular value in this regard. These displays not only facilitate the ability of the customer to locate these products within the store but often promote impulsive purchases of such items by other customers as well.
Many displays of this nature are designed to be mounted to only one specific type of support surface. Most also include a means of holding or securing the various items being displayed that is built into the apparatus. Certain tools are capable, however, of securing themselves to a display without the need of any assistance of this type. Moreover, the retailer may be losing an excellent opportunity for highlighting a feature of such products that would otherwise be missed by the customer. In particular, suspending magnetic levels from hooks or similar devices in the same manner as non-magnetic ones does little to call to the customer's attention the usefulness of the magnetic devices and how they are distinctive from other levels.
A display rack therefore that overcomes these disadvantages and that uses an inherent property of the tools being displayed to firmly engage them to a simple and inexpensive apparatus would be highly desirable.